Imagine a Credit card size computer with all the standard computer interfaces with a version of Linux OS. All this for an amazing unit price tag of just 35$ or even a 25$ for a scaled down version.
Meet the Raspberry Pi computer!!
Raspberry Pi is a single board computer made available by a British Raspberry Pi Foundation, the primary aim of the foundation is to familiarize the computer programming and digital learning to students as well as computer enthusiasts. Professional developers are interested to the same extent to try their hands on this tiny yet powerful computer.
The amazing thing about Raspberry Pi is that, it can take on any PC system in terms of its specifications.
-700 Mhz Broadcom Processor with ARM11 CPU core
-128 or 256 MB of RAM
-VideoCore GPU
-Two standard USB ports
-RCA and HDMI for display
-Ethernet Port
-Audio out
-SD Card slot (Booting is through SD, as no SSD or HDD)
Just connect the board to a Television with a RCA or a HDMI cable, a keyboard and a mouse, a Linux bootable SD card and you are ready to use it as any other computing machine. It can even play HD videos boosted by built in Graphics processor.
In my opinion the Raspberry Pi can be a boon for engineering students working on their academic or hobby projects. It will definitively give them a taste of a real embedded system and help them to build some really smart applications. With such a small form factor it can eventually replace the conventional embedded devices made out of microcontrollers which supports lesser features. You wont be surprised to see some smart TV module or a network server made of Raspberry Pi in the near future.The biggest benefit for the people using this will be the huge online community working on the same platform and sharing their ideas/solutions. The power of Open Source Hardware!!
Open Source hardware has still a long way to go, the platforms such as Arduino (A microcontroller based platform) and Raspberry Pi is promising a bright future. Similar to Linux and other Open Source Software which has brought a wave of innovations in the way we use and share softwares.
The platform is already available for pre-order on element 14 India website, so go ahead and pre-order.
Buy Raspberyy Pi from Element14.com
Share your ideas on how best this platform can be used in the real world!!!!
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